In the early days of Android, developers had to be serious nerds to pay the platform any real attention. After all, the real money was on iOS. Google has been working to make Android more hospitable to developers, and in that spirit, there's a change coming to the Google Play app—ads. Just like in regular Google Searches, you will soon see sponsored results at the top of the list.

We can attribute Android's eternal connection with sugary snacks to Google's whimsical use of desserts as codenames; but for many, Android is indelibly linked with grilled meat, thanks to the team behind the the Big Android BBQ. The huge gathering in Texas for Android fans first began in 2009 and continues to grow. Last year, the BABBQ organizers launched a new event in San Francisco to coincide with Google I/O 2014, called the Big Android Meat & Greet.

See that email in the featured image of this post? It's junk. Several developers have received this and rightfully felt very nervous, but it is simply a scheme to get you to turn over your Google credentials to scammers.

December brought us many gifts, not least of which was the official release of Android Studio v1.0. While things have been fairly quiet for developers sticking to Stable releases, the Android Tools team has been busy with a steady stream of updates for those of us on the Canary builds. After two months in development, v1.1 is finally ready to roll out to the masses.

At some point or another, most Android developers will eventually open up the profiling tools to track down bugs and performance issues in a misbehaving application. Let's be honest, the tools included with the Android SDK do leave something to be desired. Facebook has just released one of its internally-developed tools which provides network inspection, database inspection and interaction, and a support for access to the dumpapp output with the use of customizable plugins.

Developers can be found all over the world, toiling away for hours on a computer as they build cool apps and games for our gadgets. Most of them would like to earn a few duckets for their work, but that's not always possible with certain types of apps and games. Today, the doors are open for developers from 12 additional countries to register for merchant accounts and begin selling paid apps to the world.

Sony slipped the official SmartEyeglass app into the Play Store yesterday, and now here we are with an official announcement on availability (sort of). The developer edition SmartEyeglass is available for pre-order in the UK and Germany today and ships in March. It'll cost you a hefty sum to get a piece of the next wearable concept.

It can't be easy to be a BlackBerry user these days. Despite the hardware and software maker's (arguably) best efforts, the company has fallen from its height as the undisputed king of the boardroom to shipping just one out every two hundred smartphones worldwide in the last quarter. The reasons for BlackBerry's decline are legion: a failure to innovate quickly as Android and iPhone adoption soared, an ineffective ecosystem and infrastructure, and hardware missteps like the Storm at critical junctures.

With Logitech Harmony, people can control a large number of devices spread throughout their houses from a single remote or Android device. These various electronics, ranging from home entertainment systems to smart light bulbs, all communicate to a single hub.

Now Logitech is launching the Harmony API for third-party developers, so products that communicate with its system can then go on to interact with other ones.

Android developers gain a lot of advantages from working on a platform with a wide variety of libraries, open source projects, and other resources to help get their work to the finish line. Unfortunately, if a problem can’t be solved by checking out the SDK samples or reading a few dozen StackOverflow questions, it can be pretty hard to find good alternatives when they are most needed.